A Failure, but Not of Prediction
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
Background: I am currently supporting myself by betting on politics and economics. I was caught jobless when this thing hit, halting my attempt at a career switch into either coding or data science. At the end of February I posted my first forecast for 200k cases by March 20th, giving it a 96% chance.
I feel like there exists the possibility of doing better, and there exist people who are already there but no one wants to listen or change.
Watching this thing since the start of the year has been like watching a preventable slow motion crash, where many people seemed to be trying their hardest to intentionally fail.
Let's not just blame the MSM or "elites" either. I speak to people who confidently assert everything is going to be fine in a year, and when pressed for a probability it's not even in top quartile. Even if it was 90% certain, a 10% chance of a significantly negative outcome is too high.
I can open any thread on HN regarding economics and the general level of arrogant ignorance is staggering. We're on target to massively screw up the economic relief, which will make the economic stimulus phase all the more challenging. People need to be more predisposed to having possible intellectual and knowledge blind spots.
But I'm not all negative, as I remain very optimistic that people will continue to ignore reasonable warnings.
Thinking and acting to the probability model is almost a superpower; I keep finding I'm ready for 1 in 10 style events that other people don't see coming. After being told authoritatively there is a 10% chance of it happening, no less. Eg, I will look at what a 1:100 year rain event in an area will cause then make long term decisions around it.
I'd also say that when viewing something like a "1:100 year rain event" to understand that it's just a model there, and not always the actual probability, and to try to understand what limitations might exist. Climate change is likely making some events like that more frequent for example.
Now put a prize in there and I might well play.
Surely if you’re ready for more than 10% of 1-in-10 events, your probabilities are just as wrong as other people’s; it’s just that your risk management is better.
That is why I don’t like probabilities for what are fundamentally one-off events.
I think it's clear that there are some events that may be rare but which are cheaper to plan ahead for than to deal with after the fact, and vice versa (e.g. for many people self insuring against minor losses like appliance failures makes sense).
A: 10% chance you lose 100$. Preparing costs 5$
B: 10% chance you lose 100$. Preparing costs 15$
C: 10% chance you lose 200$. Preparing costs 15$
D: 10% chance you lose 200$. Preparing costs 30$
E: 10% chance you win 100$. Ticket costs 20$
F: 10% chance you win 100$. Ticket costs 5$
You prepare for A & C. You buy tickets for F
Think of it like choosing when to fold in poker
G: 5% chance one of your parents die, preparation costs $X
H: 3% chance you die, preparation costs $Y.
What at what values of $X and $Y do you prepare?
The 5%/X 3%/Y question is also hard to answer since one also has to consider how much is it mitigating, if I survive with chronic pain or something then that loses value. Assuming full mitigation:
I'd be willing to pay ~16000$ to skip a 1/30 chance of death (valuing ~480000$ to live ~50 years, or 9600/year being-alive tax)
For my parents I'd be willing to pay ~9000$ to skip a 1/20 chance of one of their's death. (valuing ~180000$ for them to live ~30 years, or 6000/year being-alive tax)
My suggestion is you don't have enough information to claim I'm making any specific mistake.
This sounds like a distinction without meaning. Using "people mistake my preparation for me believing that it will happen, so they are dumb" is weird. You're acting as if you think it will happen, of course people think you think it will happen. Why else would you bother preparing? You're not buying 10% of the sandbags you'd need, you're buying 100% of them because nothing else would do.
"Oh but I'm smarter" but your belief is leading you to take the same actions as the person who thinks 10% == yes, so in what way is it smarter? In what way is it different?
"Prepare for" is not the same thing as "think it will certainly happen". It's a case of making your cost-benefit calculations appropriately. You don't do all the things that you'd do if you thought it was 100% going to happen, you do a cheap subset.
I didn't think I'd need it - I thought it'd end up like SARS or h1n1. But it cost me $30 or something and I can afford to lose that so why not.
I bought some Bitcoin fairly early. I thought it was stupid but there was a small chance I was wrong.
In both these cases if I'd been sure I'd have acted very differently!
I'm unsure about a lot of things so sometimes I try to get on both sides of a subject.
As Alexander said repeatedly, it's cost-benefit analysis. See my other post in this thread.
If you go through life only preparing for the things you are certain will happen, you are quite likely to experience some avoidable unpleasantness.
Chanting "cost benefit analysis" doesn't change anything.
That isn't the case. Preparation isn't a binary state either - people can be more or less prepared for an occurrence. The estimated likelihood of an event changes how much time and effort should be spent preparing to it.
There is a big difference in how people behave if they thing there is a 0%, 0.05% or 98% chance of being mugged when they go outside for example. The 0.05% case would rationally start avoiding people late at night or not carrying valuables. The 98% person would not go outside.
Of course, if you persist in dismissing everything that makes a difference, then you will never figure out what the difference is.
You are being inconsistent in the way you presume (mostly mistakenly, I believe) various opinions and motives on the part of Scott Alexander, while attempting to reject opinions, motives and rational thought as being relevant to the behavior of people who prepared for C19.
> Chanting "cost benefit analysis" doesn't change anything.
Well, I agree that "chanting" (i.e. explaining to someone who will not listen, apparently) will not change anything (and least of all your understanding of the issues), but actually practicing cost-benefit analysis effectively does make a difference - as we can see, for example, in the difference in how C19 is progressing in South Korea and in Britain.
> "Oh but I'm smarter" but your belief...
Case in point.
The article says Nate Silver had Trump's chances at a little worse than 1 in 3. The average person is going to sit through 17 presidential elections.
I don't have to be very clever to say that Trump winning is totally consistent with the model; and anyone who was caught by surprise has failed to understand probability. 29% is not saying no chance of victory and it isn't really that surprising. It isn't even a forecast of defeat if you think about it. It is evidence that a defeat was likely, but a modeled probability is not a forecast - it is evidence used in forecasting.
I'm really claiming that most people will hear "10% chance of disaster!" then after it didn't pan out 9 times they'll start talking about the boy who cried wolf or stopped clocks when the disaster strikes the 10th time. I have a massive advantage over them, because that is exactly the wrong attitude towards probabilities.
Not necessarily; as Alexander mentioned repeatedly, it depends on the cost of repeatedly preparing unnecessarily versus the cost of not being prepared that one time it happens.
Just about the whole of aviation safety, to give one extended example, is based on this principle.
Disagree, it depends how much it costs to be ready, and how much it costs to be unprepared if the 1-in-10 event happens.
This is a problem very generally -- and is significantly exacerbated by the highly-polarized nature of our society at present. Right now, virtually anything interesting becomes a part of the political identity fight immediately -- and once that happens, reinforcing the narrative is more important than anything else. Not just by people actively trying to advance the narrative -- but because people collectively only talk to other people from their tribe, and so they get facts and "facts" that fit the narrative.
The Coronavirus is no exception. In early February, it was a Republican/Right position that the Coronavirus was dangerous and a Democrat/Left position that Coronavirus fears were an excuse to hate Asian/Chinese people.
Ironically, now, in April, it's a Republican/Right position that Coronavirus fears are dramatically overblown / a crisis being exaggerated for political or economic gains, and it's now a Democrat/Left position that the Coronavirus is a near-existential level threat that requires the strongest response possible.
These positions were initially formed from data, but once the narratives are chosen, partisans do what partisans do -- and since basically everybody is hyperpartisan now, that means we get where we are.
Republicans back then however also claimed it is under control and not much if threat and definitely did not advocated for any measures (testing, masks, making people stay at home, closing public events) except closing direct flies from China.
There was no observable flop between the two parties positions.
Democrats can simultaneously believe that 1.) calling virus China virus and closing exactly direct flights is mostly about racism and pushing blame from own inaction 2.) virus is threat, crisis and country needs to act in other ways.
Republicans can simultaneously believe it is nothingburger no worst then flu exaggerated by Democrats for political reasons and then call it China virus.
If you are a Democrat, you think of Republicans as Nazis and white supremacists. If you're a Republican, you think of Democrats as authoritarians and communists.
Naturally, once you "know" that the other side is the party of pure evil, you know that whatever the propose, you must oppose. (Even if you're a politician who doesn't really believe this, you wouldn't want to be seen as agreeing with monsters).
A related problem is that nobody trusts our institutions and processes. Republicans mostly believe that the Democrats have built their power primarily on vote fraud and the support of the media. (Things like the big push for extended time mail-in ballots and "ballot harvesting" which produce ballots with no chain of custody feed these fears of vote fraud). Democrats mostly believe that Republicans have built their power on secret backroom deals with foreign powers and a collection of billionaires (there have been a variety of investigations into folks' dealings with Russia in particular.)
As a result nobody much cares about preserving the norms or the niceties -- only winning the fight of the moment.
If you're an American, you can likely point to one or two things that "the other side" did that started this process -- my Republican friends and my Democrat friends each tell me about what the enemy did to start the fight. (Republicans are more likely to use the word 'war', but they both tend to see it as an existential struggle for our continued freedom)
Against that background of hate and distrust, every action is seen as obviously being the worst possible thing.
I know plenty of (smart) Republicans who know for certain that coronavirus lockdowns are part of a premeditated plan to finally end liberty and install a new communist dictatorship in November (that's why mail in balloting is holding up the coronavirus relief bill -- Democrats need to make sure they can vote fraud their way to 100% control before we demand to be let out of our houses).
Before you tell me that they aren't smart, I also know some very smart and capable Democrats that believe that Republicans want to reopen states like Michigan because the only people who will go back to work in big numbers will be the poor and minorities, and the entire goal of the coronavirus response was to use it as best as possible to "liquidate" the poor and brown people, so that the rich who control Republicans can have lower taxes and lots of vacant property to buy up for cheap. That's also why the borders are closed -- they believe that is intended to be permanent and in both directions, since Republicans hate foreigners.
These that I have presented are the "strong" versions of the beliefs I've encountered. They're not universal, but the hate and distrust implied by them is nearly universal.
I am presumably not an exception, though the (unusual) fact that I keep members of both parties in my social circles helps keep me able to see both perspectives clearer than most seem to.
* Fees are high. They charge 10% of profits and and additional 5% for withdrawals.
* Markets were illiquid. There aren't enough shares available to put much money to work. There's an $850 limit per bet, but it's hard to reach that amount.
* Bets can take a long time to settle. So even if you are 90% certain of something trading at 50%, you can't put a ton of money into that view, nor can you necessarily get paid quickly.
* Occasionally bets are determined by dumb technicalities. As I recall the bet for Powell being the next Fed chair settled on No, because the date referenced in the bet was a holiday or something, and he was confirmed on the next business day.
If you are smart enough to make significant money on PredictIt aren't you smart enough to make more money doing almost anything else?
Yep. I was skeptical about if they were beatable initially.
> Markets were illiquid.
Not always true. This varies a lot between markets. If you look at the Democratic nominee markets, you can buy as many shares you like.
> $850 limit
This is per bracket. So you can max No on several candidates in a market if you want, and PI also refunds the amount that is impossible to lose since only one can resolve as Yes. There are also a lot of correlated markets that are effectively the same bet. You can bet on Biden being the nominee at least 4 different ways if you want.
> Bets can take a long time to settle.
You can sell at any point in time. No need to wait. There are long and short term markets.
If there was something 50% that was 90%, I'd have no problem taking that bet. But it's something like a 2020 election you can always wait until closer to the election. Though some markets appreciate during that span of time.
> dumb technicalities
> Powell being next Fed chair
Always read the rules. All predictions are useless without a time.
Powell market was free money. The good players were telling people the correct answer in the comments for months but people didn't want to listen. Amazing.
> aren't you smart enough to make more money doing almost anything else?
That's what I was aiming for before the economic shock, but it's not like people think "Oh you won money at bet on politics? Here is job"
Practice is also good. If you're not used to probabilistic thinking you'll need to develop that intuition and calibration.
Anything about how to think about things better is going to be useful. There's a Coursera course called Model Thinking that is might be useful. Just being curious about things in general and pushing yourself outside of your normal areas of competency/interest.
It might seem weird, but I find Twitter to be pretty essential these days. There are a lot of smart people freely sharing information and some don't mind answering questions.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995360-superforecastin...
The idea is to make lots of time-limited, falsifiable predictions with percentage estimates attached and check your track record.
Don’t underestimate the value of domain specific knowledge and the costs of lacking it. Just because you know how to count cards doesn’t mean you know how to deal cards, how to run a casino, or most importantly, how to avoid getting caught.
So what do you think of the stock market rebound?
The rebound does seem like early overconfidence, but could be a bet on the fact that public corporations are more likely to get bailouts than not. I hope the markets are right that it's more than that. But markets seem to do a lot of dumb things over the short and medium term.
For political bets you can bet on betting sites. Much harder to earn an income though.
But I literally forgot about puts. I was under the impression you had to be an accredited investor.
I was thinking about withdrawing on the 20th/21st of feb, when spread happened in Korea and Italy locked down some northern towns. Puts were still very cheap then.
Stock markets and futures exchanges can be reasonably modeled as placing bets, too.
And in effect they could do whatever they wanted.
In fact, I think the only criticism that can be leveled at these groups are ignorance of risk mitigation strategies and cost-benefit analysis. More or less what Scott put in his post. (Short aside: the mask calculus seemed incredibly obvious to me from the start. I was not embarrassed to wear a mask on a flight back east from CA in late February, but I did hear about my stupidity from quite a few of the aforementioned. Including my wife. Who knows if the masks work, but the critics failed critical thinking 101. They're all Goofi. Except my wife.)
With that in mind (and at the risk of indulging in what might consider "arrogant ignorance"), I would like to gently push back on this sentence:
> We're on target to massively screw up the economic relief, which will make the economic stimulus phase all the more challenging. People need to be more predisposed to having possible intellectual and knowledge blind spots.
What specifically are you referring to? Is the rescue plan doing too little? Too much? No effect? Is Congress making uncertainty worse by not replenishing the fund for small business loans? Are they even a good idea?
The problem is no one can say much of anything about this crisis because it's unprecedented. We haven't had a financial crisis or some spontaneous crash in asset prices. The shock came from the real economy first, at least as far as I can tell. I debate with my economist friends (most of whom have advanced degrees in the subject beyond my B.S.) about whether this is even mostly a supply or demand shock. The opinion is mixed (two economists -> three opinions). I've probed what policy responses should be enacted from a variety of perspectives, or what economic recovery looks like. All over the map again.
I've been a bit more optimistic than most, since I see this as primarily a demand shock starting with entertainment, travel and hospitality and then spreading to other sectors (enforced by fiat). Keynesian response might be quite effective. And the rescue plan is quite close to what Keynes himself wrote in ch. 24 of the General Theory: nationalized investment and income redistribution to those with the highest marginal propensity to consume. But my assumptions could be way off. It could be that this thing really was a supply shock through and through, or that debt of all types really has been untenably high, or that there are serious problems that have arisen in the real economy as a result of the crisis.
I do find that alongside degrees of confidence (which is a good mental cold shower for making bold claims) some skin in the game is useful as well. (Mine is that I have a $10 bet with a friend that $DIS will be above $120/share on August 1 (might lose that one) and that I've moved a few grand from cash into the market at times during the past 7 weeks or so.) I really appreciate that you gave a clue that you have made some bets, but I'd be curious as to what those are. That would represent some skin in the game as well, and reflect your beliefs about what the economic problems will be.
I will say I know a lot more about economics, but I was a lot more confident that an epidemic would occur than I am about any particular short-run economic outcome.
And
"...they didn’t beat the experts in epidemiology. Whatever probability of pandemic the experts and prediction markets gave for coronavirus getting really bad, these people didn’t necessarily give a higher probability. They were just better at probabilistic reasoning, so they had different reactions to the same number..."
I noticed that. As a math person, things were exceptionally clear at a point, clearer than many uncertain events tbh. Simple exponential growth this, I can understand ... and so could a significant slice of people.
But my question is: if epidemiologists aren't experts at THIS, wtf are they experts in? Isn't this exactly the "classic" circumstance any average epidemiologist should be a able to see in a heartbeat. Apparently not, so what do they train these people in? Question maybe half rhetorical but also serious. What's "expert knowledge" in these circumstances.
I think you may be misreading the article. It claims epidemiologists did, in fact, see this in a heartbeat.
One is seeing that exponential growth is involved. The second is seeing the fatality statistics are going to much more reliable than test results and that fatality statistics are effectively delayed 2-3 weeks for the virus to incubate.
With this, Tomas Pueyo laid out the case as well as anyone but these numbers are easy to get, why all the listed people were saying this. If you didn't get, sorry about that, it's a failure on a problem no harder than an advanced undergraduate modeling class final. The situation was obvious to that degree of obvious - which I think is much more obvious than the likelihood of most moderately common events in modern society.
And further, I'd claim there aren't many places in the world where you can see exponential growth stopping - certainly not in deaths in the US - 1000 death in NYC today. US cases have slowed their growth 'cause US testing is once again a mess. Even California doesn't have much evidence of a peak and reasonable evidence exponential continues. So maybe Italy, Spain, South Korea, China and Washington state are not experiencing exponential. And that's not comforting.
And you're wrong about the article - it definitely says the mainstream epidemiologists got it wrong 'cause they did.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
But, ten days after Tomas's article, on March 20, I was still very concerned about a friend in New Zealand whose partner was due to deliver a child in 5 weeks, because New Zealand's confirmed case numbers were growing exponentially at 30% per day, same as they do in every country at first — but, again, it was too early to have any real death statistics for New Zealand. So I projected 5 weeks into the future and predicted the kind of apocalyptic healthcare breakdown we had seen in China and were starting to see in Italy and Spain: hundreds of thousands of confirmed COVID-19 cases overwhelming the healthcare system in New Zealand.
Instead, the exponential growth in New Zealand continued for only another week, and then something stopped it — probably the lockdown measures that were put in place on March 25, although there's still the unlikely possibility of a very large number of asymptomatic cases (as suggested by the recent Stanford preprint) or existing cross-immunity from some less fatal coronavirus. My friend's partner delivered a healthy baby girl a couple of weeks early on April 10, at which point there were only 1283 total confirmed cases in New Zealand, a number growing only 3.6% per day. Currently NZ has 1431 confirmed cases and 12 deaths — worse than Taiwan, but still a shining paragon of pandemic control compared to almost any country in Europe.
So, did I "get things exactly right" when I urged my friend to consult obstetricians about the possibility of inducing labor early, and to get whatever training he could in assisting homebirths in case that was necessary? Certainly I was urging him to prepare for a situation that did not in fact come to pass. Could it have come to pass? Certainly nothing I knew about NZ excluded the possibility or made it very unlikely — perhaps there were things he knew about NZ that excluded the possibility.
I think the best course of action, faced with uncertainties of such enormity, is usually to make preparations that will be unnecessary 90% or 95% of the time — not so much that you will devote the majority of your resources to those preparations, but enough that you are well prepared on the occasions where catastrophe does strike.
But my extrapolation of exponential growth definitely did not come to pass. In that sense, I extrapolated simple exponential growth wrong.
I'm very interested to see what projections for this pandemic you committed to in January and February, since you're saying that what would happen was "exceptionally clear" for you. Where did you post them?
— ⁂ —
As for what the epidemiologists said, you literally quoted the part of the article where Alexander claims that "these people [who got things exactly right] didn't necessarily give a higher probability [than the experts [in epidemiology] and prediction markets gave for coronavirus getting really bad]". That is, the epidemiologists gave the same probability distribution over likely outcomes as the "generic smart people who got things exactly right". To me, that reads as exactly the opposite of saying "the mainstream epidemiologists got it wrong". And in fact the mainstream epidemiologists, if by that we mean the WHO, declared COVID-19 a "public health emergency of international concern" on January 30th, an action they had taken only five times before in history. Ignorant dilettantes writing articles in Vox or the New York Times, or running the country's government like a reality TV show, are not mainstream epidemiologists.
So, I don't think either the article or objective facts support your thesis that "the mainstream epidemiologists got it wrong"; what makes you think otherwise?
They are experts, but aren't used to rapid analysis with incomplete data.
The very early data (early-mid January) was very unclear. This is completely normal with a new disease (just look at how the US has to rely on newspapers and universities for national reporting numbers!)
But epidemiologists are reluctant to guess when we weren't even sure about the transmission mechanism, how infectious it is, incubation times, or even hospitalisation numbers (don't forget it's a respiratory disease and there was no test available until well into January)
(Not an epidemiologist, but I've had papers published by the CDC on epidemiology)
There are a few exceptions, e.g. some military commanders with real field experience. Some stock market speculators. A rare few skilled politicians. But the vast majority know the tools, rituals and heuristics of their trade, and apply them blindly. This normally works well. But during times of crisis, when knowledge is uncertain and data changes rapidly, it leads to huge mistakes. Like clockwork, one after the other.
I could go on and on about examples of this from different fields, observed only during the last 6 weeks.
In scenarios with high uncertainty in parameters, the outside view can perform as well as or better than the inside view.
Other countries that were hit by it and by SARS or MERS were ready for it.
Closest to home, I'd say Software Engineering mostly fits this description. 90% of people who call themselves that are terrible at actually making software.
Or, for example, most of the best fiction is not written by English Literature majors.
Perhaps epidemiology is like that. Based on what I've seen in the last few months, I'm not impressed.
If you're trying to compile a set of facts, you very likely want a system which is incomplete, but correct. ie false positives have a significant cost to your models, where you essentially have a technical debt of needing to weed out false facts
Policy should follow risk analysis, but research which is not time sensitive has compounding factors which favor building certainty before skipping ahead
Think of it like software development: planning/testing/etc have high rewards throughout development, but sometimes you need to sell a rushed MVP
What you fail to mention is that had the US Federal Government gotten this right, all those people would have been wrong.
Many people assumed that the CDC/NIH/etc. was going to react to this like Ebola and SARS. Now THAT was a mistaken assumption.
They argued about models and about R0 and so on. But fundamentally, they predicted the spread.
They're experts at remaining epidemiologists. Epidemiology is a lose-lose profession. If you overreact, then you get blamed. If you underreact, then you get blamed. Every epidemiologist who was willing to put their predictions in clear, unambiguous language and put their reputations on the line to urge decisive action was drummed out when MERS didn't turn out to be a big deal or Ebola didn't turn out to be a big deal or when H1N1 didn't turn out to be a big deal or when SARS didn't turn out to be a big deal.
Thus, what remains are people putting their predictions in mush mouthed, carefully qualified scientific language that is all technically correct but carefully calibrated not to encourage anyone to do anything.
First time entrants have an advantage in the field in that they don't care if they get drummed out.
I think it is far too early to declare anyone "exactly right". We won't know for months, maybe years; maybe we will never know because it will be impossible to disentangle the effects of the virus and the response. The more fundamental problem, in my view, is tunnel-vision on the epidemiological models. The epidemiological models represent, or should represent, input into a higher-level model that we might call the covid overall impact model. Such a model would take into account second and third order effects, it would include not just the virus but also the effects produced by the response. It would factor in economic, political, psychological, non-covid health, and broad societal effects. This is the model and perspective that really matters.
> The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb.
I know the instant reaction is "people predict things all the time, some are bound to come out right", but this seems so specific that I think it's not just pure chance... we're just not heeding some of the warnings.
------
Now one reaction to the blog post: it does make a lot of good points (especially about masks), but for the part about shutting society at least, it doesn't seem to account for the follow-on effects of being wrong. If governments had shut things down due to a 10% chance of a pandemic, and it was prevented, chances are decent that a lot of not-similarly-reasoning people would've been angry. A lot of people, some for good reason and some for bad, just don't trust their governments (or the media) enough, and of those that do, a fair chunk are going under a lot of hardship to comply. So they don't just say "okay, I don't see it that way, but I trust you that this is for the best, even if it means I can't put bread on the table for my family, so I'll just live with the consequences and stay at home." Now I'm not really saying this is an excuse for governments/media to send poor messages, but it's an understandable human component... surely you can't attribute everything to irrational probabilistic reasoning?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2176051/#__sec2...
Basically the system has too much delay to respond, even to a strong signal. Even significant local deaths in the US is not strong enough to change politics and media. If Ebola had broken out we would have had the same problem.
I think we are stuck in a local maximum. It takes a significant push for the system to escape oscillating back to where we are.
What? I remember Hubei was shut down with airports, and the rest of the world had to scramble evac flights to retrieve their citizens from the area.
I remember suggesting here and elsewhere that lockdowns should be announced on the spot, and quarantines should be applied retroactively. I.e. if at 18:00 the president/prime minister gets on air and announces a lockdown, that lockdown should be active from 18:00, and everyone coming into the country in the 14 days before the announcement should be quarantined.
I remember being shouted down as suggesting something extremely undemocratic. After all, the law isn't supposed to work backwards (all the cases where it does notwithstanding).
Obviously yes, and not only in the US. The complete lack of any preparation for this kind of events in most of the world is what makes this specific event so disastrous, and the extent of that disaster is going to be more visible only once everything settles -- we're still far from that.
It's certainly possible that an existing, or, more likely, new ebola/filovirus strain could become a pandemic, too, though. Hopefully we'd be able to spot it early enough. (And there are some vaccines, which may or may not work against a new strain.) And of course it could really be anything.
Isn't that exactly what we're doing with social distancing?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavi...
Note that even South Korea was apparently monitoring everyone and suddenly 1 person slipped through and infected like a thousand people (read this recently, don't have the link handy).
She probably wasn't even the first person in the Shincheonji Church in Daegu to be infected. The timeline of her infection is just too late compared to the cases at the hospital in Cheongdo potentially tied to other church members, most of the membership is much younger than her and therefore likely to display mild or no symptoms, and some of them had in fact travelled to China. If anything, it seems likely that she caught it from there rather than the other way around.
This wasn't a long range problem by the time there were cases in the US - it was the early stage of the catastrophe starting, when it could have been much more cheaply prevented.
Right. I had not seen this paper. But then, I'm just some anonymous coward who writes a lot about anonymity and privacy.
But if I were, say, an epidemiologist specializing in viral diseases, I would likely have remembered this paper, as soon as I heard about the Wuhan outbreak.
So what stopped that paper's authors from raising an alarm? And what about all the experts who had read it?
And about TFA, given that it doesn't cite that paper, and so explore how it got ignored, it's hard to take it seriously.
One only has to look around HN for posts about using the current crisis for various unrelated political and economic goals to understand why this might be. Why, just in the last three minutes on HN, I came across media sources advocating everything from nationalizing Amazon (now that it's "a public good" because of the crisis) to permanently banning the use of vehicles in cities (now that the crisis has shown how lovely the inner city air is when both cars and factories all stop).
Nobody's willing to let a crisis "go to waste", and so nobody trusts anybody to be giving them true information untainted by their ulterior motives.
Not trusting that the government and the media have your best interests at heart is simply being aware of how things are.
The reason the CDC didn’t previously recommend face masks could’ve been because of a lack of RCT. But in order to do that, they would have had to expose subjects to disease without face masks which wouldn’t make sense. Goes to show there has to better ways for judging the viability of something without resorting to a strict binary of “do or do not”
It's not just a question of how to judge but who makes the judgment. Part of the point of the article is that wearing a mask seems like something you should be able to conclude is a good idea based on common sense; you shouldn't need to wait for an expert to tell you, and if the expert is telling you something that seems to conflict with common sense, you shouldn't automatically disregard common sense.
In this case: doctors wearing masks conflicts with doctors recommend people don’t wear masks.
That's not to say that doctors (and others) can't have reasons other than "masks don't work" for recommending that people (other than other doctors) don't wear masks. Just that doctors wearing masks themselves, by itself, is not enough to know that their recommendation for ordinary people not to wear masks is unreliable. You need more information.
We can say "gee, we should appoint more truthful bureaucrats".
It isn't a crazy guess that (for this pandemic) a useful mask for a normal everyday person is anything that puts something in front of their face that makes it a little harder to breath and baffles the air currents.
There may be a shortage of proven face masks but there is no shortage at all of things that could be sewn up to cover faces and deaden air currents. The cost is tiny vs the risk of it not working.
Officials who are more worried about preventing a response to the potential crisis than the potential crisis should not be in charge if there is a potential crisis. We want people to change their behaviors if there is a crisis. Ideally even before the evidence in overwhelming that there is a problem.
For that to work, however, requires a sense of community and level of trust in government that has been in short supply in the US in recent years. These factors were also in play for swine flu and the other potential pandemics the article examined CDC rsponses for. In a crisis, officials have to base their decisions on current conditions, not on what they should ideally be. Restoring trust in government is extremely important, but can’t be accomplished in the timescale necessary to be useful for this crisis.
Lying erodes public trust.
> I went into it thinking they’d lied to us, hoping to prevent hoarders from buying up so many masks that there weren’t enough for health workers. Turns out that’s not true. The CDC has been singing the same tune for the past ten years. Swine flu, don’t wear masks. SARS, don’t wear masks. They’ve been really consistent on this point. But why?
Quoted text included this link: https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/masks_cdc.png
>I think the CDC did actually perform a cross-benefit analysis on masks during the initial segment of the outbreak. Given the not-incontrovertible, yet positive, efficacy of masks, combined with the implications of a PPE shortage for healthcare workers meant that there probably was a calculated decision made to not recommend masks. (emphasis added)
You postulated that the CDC not recommending masks was due to a recent cost-benefit analysis taking into account a circumstance (mask shortage) that has only been true for a few months. The article and link shows that the recommendation predated that by 10 years. Ergo the mask shortage could not be the cause of that recommendation.
There's no reason to even think that the CDC considered recommending masks - surely the default position is to leave pre-existing recommendations (don't wear masks) in place. You speculated that they did an analysis, which is not in evidence, and made a conclusion based on factors that may or may not have been important even had the analysis happened. That seems pretty weak to me.
You're right, there is a hidden assumption I have here that I did not document. I believe the CDC is, within human limits, a capable organization of experts. I assumed that it was more likely for an organization of experts to perform a cost-benefit analysis than simply reiterate advice given in the past under similar situations. If you disagree with this assumption, then that's where we disagree.
You seem to think they looked at it, found evidence that masks were effective, but then decided not to tell anyone due to the shortage. But then, a few months later, while that mask shortage was still in effect they decided to reverse that decision. Which is completely irrational.
I'd say I'm assuming it's an organization like any other. You're assuming it's populated by maliciously irrational people who are out to get you.
Changed from what? During previous coronavirus epidemics, the CDC did not recommend wearing masks, and during the earlier stages of the pandemic they did not either.
> why would they reevaluate the whole thing? No organization, no matter how capable or expert, has infinite time or resources to reevaluate every past policy every day
What... else would they be doing? The CDC's entire mission is to steward American public health. If they can't reevaluate in the face of a new threat, well, what good are they really?
> You seem to think they looked at it, found evidence that masks were effective
Yes, I do think the CDC is capable of performing a literature survey on masks. There have been several papers on masks, N95 or not, during previous epidemics. You can find several papers related to masks dating from the original SARS epidemic. Some of these papers were funded by the CDC themselves, so it makes absolute sense to look back at one's own publications.
> but then decided not to tell anyone due to the shortage.
I believe the CDC made a calculated decision based on an American population would hoard resources. In hindsight, some of this is occurring. Despite no actual shortages in production of toilet paper, flour, and yeast, there are shortages in supermarkets throughout the US, and I've heard anecdotes from friends' parents who decided to hoard masks, flour, and yest because they "were worried".
> But then, a few months later, while that mask shortage was still in effect they decided to reverse that decision. Which is completely irrational.
Guidance changes. Factors that go into updating your risk cost-benefit analysis (better understanding of transmission rates, political pressure, etc.) change over time, and an effective leader does not double down on previous decisions in the face of new information. There's nothing irrational about changing your position.
Tell you what, let's assume that you're right. The CDC is continuously reevaluating mask usage by the general public, but recommended against it due to fears of a shortage and/or hoarding. That being the case, please help me understand the following:
1) Why did the CDC change guidance on mask usage despite the shortage and risks of hoarding being, if anything, worse than before? If it was the controlling factor before, why is it not a concern anymore?
2) If they are continuously reevaluating policies, and believed masks should be used, why was the guidance not changed at any point in the last 10 years when there was no shortage or any particular reason to worry about hoarding?
3) Why is this a more parsimonious or plausible explanation than the one advanced in TFA, which is that they had a very high standard of evidence which they have relaxed somewhat in the face of a pandemic?
* You said X did A only because of situation B.
* But X does A even in situation not-B.
* Therefore, situation B is not a necessary condition to cause A.
The only way to rescue "mask shortage" as causing the WHO's advice is if you can show that whatever caused the advice last time was missing this time, so the WHO was primed to reverse the advice until "mask shortage" brought it back to do the same advice again.
Garbage In, Garbage Out. You are making several assumptions in order to apply this "logical" (which logic? This isn't FOL, since FOL has no concept of time, so I'm guessing you're invoking some Temporal Logic) argument, you need to assume that the CDC is a static, homogeneous organization that, for the purposes of this statement, continues to be a valid X between the past and the present. This seems naive to me; the CDC has changed in funding, priorities, membership, and leadership over time, and it's unclear to me how you can use past behavior as an indicator of future communication.
As in: The CDC is a huge government bureaucracy that employs (and cannot swiftly fire) enormous numbers of people from diverse backgrounds. If RCTs aren't the standard, well then why not also wear crystals to ward off the virus? They're inexpensive, and they couldn't hurt-- you can probably find a poorly controlled study to support it too.
The CDC is not human, it is a meat-and-paper-political-machine. You cannot understand it's actions under the same framework you'd use to judge another person.
The CDC must contain internal defenses against hokum which are much stronger than any person needs to personally have.
So why does the CDC sometimes provide overly conservative advice even when doing so causes death? For the same reason the scorpion stings: it's in its nature.
It's far from clear to me that a CDC which did make a more prudent facemask recommendation would actually be a better organization overall. Sure, it would have gotten this one right, but it would have likely given other bad advice as a result.
Alexander's discussion of parachutes gave some good heuristics for when you should trust common sense vs require an RCT, which explains why his advice doesn't generalize to advocating crystals.
The heuristic was basically that you should trust common sense when
a) there's a solid scientific model of the key dynamics,
b) the purported remedy is cheap, and
c) the costs of not stopping the threat are disproportionately high.
Crystals meet b)[1] and c) but fail a) -- we don't have a validated model of crytal/virus interactions. In contrast, we know that (some) viruses (including this one) spread through unimpeded airflow, and masks impede said airflow. We know that high-speed impacts between your body and the ground are deadly, and parachutes demonstrably slow the falling speed of objects.
Thus, you should go with common sense in the absence of an RCT for parachutes and masks but not crystals.
[1] They might fail b) depending on the particular charlatan!
Due to placebo effect you could probably even extract a "reduces symptoms" in a not very good human study too.
:)
I don't disagree that you could setup a criteria which would admit masks and parachutes but deny crystals. But would it also deny all (or even almost all) other manner of 'obvious' snake oil past or future?
Also, salt healing doesn’t involve salts touch the virus in any way know to break them down.
Your prior post asserted crystals might pass (b) and (c) but fail (a); my response was simply that I am not entirely convinced that it would unless a was fairly rigorous.
And what the CDC appears to be doing-- requiring a RCT-- can be seen as an extremely rigorous (a).
Sorry about the communications failure-- communication is hard. I appreciated your response, even if I apparently missed the point.
And I don't see a communications failure; you're communicating your idea fine, it's just based on not having read, and misunderstanding, the heuristics the author advocated for "when to require an RCT".
>And what the CDC appears to be doing-- requiring a RCT-- can be seen as an extremely rigorous (a).
And once again, it's a poor handling of evidence, for exactly the same reason it would be to "not advocate parachutes for jumping out of a plane" until the RCTs come in. That can only "be seen as rigorous" if you ignored the very considerations the author mentions.
I'll just excerpt a characteristic portion so you don't have to go to the site:
>>Goofus started with the position that masks, being a new idea, needed incontrovertible proof. When the few studies that appeared weren’t incontrovertible enough, he concluded that people shouldn’t wear masks.
>>Gallant would have recognized the uncertainty – based on the studies we can’t be 100% sure masks definitely work for this particular condition – and done a cost-benefit analysis. Common sensically, it seems like masks probably should work. The existing evidence for masks is highly suggestive, even if it’s not utter proof. Maybe 80% chance they work, something like that? If you can buy an 80% chance of stopping a deadly pandemic for the cost of having to wear some silly cloth over your face, probably that’s a good deal. Even though regular medicine has good reasons for being as conservative as it is, during a crisis you have to be able to think on your feet.
But I have noticed many people not observing social distancing and stay-at-home requests. Perhaps if those people ignore the guidance because they're not convinced it's important, those same people would judge mask-wearing to be a waste of effort.
Perhaps another issue is people who have heard that wearing cloth masks mostly prevents you from getting others sick, and some of them just can't be bothered to make small sacrifices for the speculative benefit of strangers?
Seems pretty consistent with my point - if masks weren't believed to be effective they would not be recommended "if unavoidable" , a use / don't use recommendation is not the same as a scientific finding of efficacy - it almost always factors in an implicit cost-benefit analysis of exactly the kind SSC advocates for. Case in point - all countries are now recommending (and in some places legally requiring) masks and not because a bunch of RCTs were conducted in the last two months.
The predictions in these blog posts about pandemic best practices were in retrospect fairly accurate (see e.g. discussion under "Social distancing will be important but unpleasant") and have been a pretty good guide for the first month of major international response.
We're kind of into uncharted waters now though, and I'm wondering who else will have accurate predictions of how the next year or two will go.
There have been several out-of-control pandemics in human history that we can look at. It’s true that lots of things have changed between the Bubonic plague sweeping through Europe and now, but people are still people; there may be some insights there. You’d have to ask a historian (I’m not one).
As different regions get this under control, I expect there to be health screenings required for international travel. In the old days, this was quarantine for inbound travellers, but adding a week or two to travel times is a lot less palatable now. We now have other, faster, ways of determining if someone is ill and I expect them to be deployed to protect areas that have succeeded.
> For that matter, why didn’t you post this – on Facebook, on Twitter, on the comments here? You could have gone down in legend
Well, I did. I started hedging against a stock market collapse on Feb. 19 and sold half my tax-exposed holdings on Feb. 28, incurring a really painful skin-in-the-game tax bill.
In the first week of March, I made a very alarmist post on my personal social media profile, announcing to all my contacts a call to institute quarantines, work-from-home, reduce public transport use, face masks in public and outlaw crowds until control of the epidemic control was evident. This was after reading anonymous first-hand accounts from doctors in Lombardia, following the obvious exponential trend of spread in every country hit and watching China shut down the economy of a meteopolis. At this point, it was clear what would happen. Maybe not if you struggle to disregard opinions that don’t match the data, but that’s not the point.
I never take these kinds of defensive or alarmist measures in times of peace. It was a one-time thing, and I felt like a complete freak for going against the consensus and sticking my head out among educated and respected friends. Had the worst FOMO of my life regarding the tax bill and stock market hedges. But I was right, I am not usually wrong and this is not a post-fact rationalization. This was predictable in early March, at the latest.
Maybe the author is right that society would have been unable to heed these warnings, but that’s practically a tautology, given that we know how things played out in most Western countries.
My family heeded my warnings, and stayed safe through the most critical phase when the disease was rampant but not obvious.
The vast majority of people "stayed safe" through the most critical phase, regardless of behavior. even a million infections in USA is statistically almost no one.
It's an exponential process and the world is big, and still now, deep into the disaster, most people haven't developed symptoms.
You've got a point regarding the population in general, and the sentence you're pointing at is peripheral to my point. But I have caused a significant decrease of risk of a catastrophic outcome to some people dear to me.
They likely would have been okay. But "likely" doesn't cut it when the cost of defensive measures are low and the result of being unlucky is permanent loss of health or death.
There was some initial idiocy of course, like Boris shaking hands with everybody in a hospital he visited.
They should probably be criticised more for their general preparedness and tight health care spending in the face of an ageing population.
That said, I do think it bears some mention that a substantial amount of the early Coronavirus discussion was being poisoned by people who were not arguing in good faith. That sucked a fair amount of the oxygen out of the debate, and I suspect may have left journalists in less of a position to provide thoughtful context around expert opinions. In other words, flat earthers occupying enough print and mindshare to make it hard to focus on the subtleties of Keplerian motion.
No, it's mainly not. The problem is people assume tomorrow is going to be like today and yesterday (for all problems, not just this one). Add to that that people don't like hearing unpleasant news and will tune it out. Net result: they ignore it and when pushed will start to deny it. You can add on top that rare newspaper editors that do recognise a risk will not want to piss off their readership by telling them the truth (or a or probably future occurrence) that they will get angry at. Give the people what they want, not what they need.
For covid, I started stockpiling a bit of food etc. about a month before anyone else. My calculation was, this is likely to happen but may not. If things kick off I may need it. If they don't, I eat it anyway. There's no downside. (Incidentally I did the same ~2007 before the crash for the same reason. Turned out unnecessary then).
What happened when I told people about covid usually follows 2 particular patterns 1) "No don't be stupid, it's not that bad" - simple denial. 2) they stare at you full-face on, totally expressionless for about 2 or 3 seconds, they turn their head away, exhale, turn back and start talking about something else as if what you'd said never happened - blanking it. It's a curious, quite consistent response when it happens.
We get all the warning we need, the majority of people just don't want to know. QV. climate change, carrington events, epidemics (we had plenty of epidemiologists saying When not If), financial crashes. It's all there if you want to know.
If there were journalistic standards and not just first to print clickbait, there would have to be nearly as many corrections and retractions as there are news stories.
The constitution guarantees freedom to publish, but it would be really nice into have some legal standard for accurate reporting of current events in good faith.
Weak, very weak.
[1] https://necsi.edu/systemic-risk-of-pandemic-via-novel-pathog...
Remember that experiment with smoke in the room with actors sitting and chatting like this is totally fine? [0] Posting a tweet "I am getting ready to 3-6 months quarantine and advise everybody to do so as well" has much more internal pressure.
[0] http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_smoke_filled_...
Also he really seems to mis-comprehend probability and confidence intervals -- like most people. A 29% chance of Trump winning should have been a five alarm alert that there was a significant chance of catastrophy -- even for Republicans. But we're too focused on the things that are very likely. (Like death, and as an American prelude, bankruptcy from health costs, being screwed by megacorps, taxes, and rich getting unfair tax breaks.) If car accidents weren't common and easily foreseeable, would we have insurance? Only if part of the system made us, based on risk analysis.
His prior post has already proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t...
Perhaps that post is a prerequisite to this post.
Oh, well you're in luck. I have just the thing for you:
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/best-materials-make-diy-...
This image is the quick, all-encompassing money-shot: https://smartairfilters.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/202...
You can make the argument that homemade masks won't reach those levels of effectiveness because of a lack of a strong seal around the airways. And there have been no real-world case studies of cotton masks protecting people from getting sick.
But there are plenty of arguments to be made that support the idea that if 100% of the population wore a cotton shirt around their face, then the pandemic would be strongly mitigated.
This statement is so obviously and absurdly wrong it makes it difficult to appreciate the rest of the article.
Operationally speaking, the market moves based on the actions of market participants and thus the primary intellectual challenge is predicting those actions. Since currently the Federal Reserve working in concert with the US Treasury is an active market participant with unlimited capitalization that is telegraphing its moves, that is what's moving the market. Literally nobody trades on the reality that thousands of small businesses are in danger of going bust. Personally I think it's awful, but I don't have the capital to fix it.
Conditioned on what? How would you model that? Go back and change the weather? Redo polls?
> First, a bunch of generic smart people on Twitter who got things exactly right – there are too many of these people to name, but Scott Aaronson highlights “Bill Gates, Balaji Srinivasan, Paul Graham, Greg Cochran, Robin Hanson, Sarah Constantin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nicholas Christakis.”
This is pretty much the definition of cherry-picking. How many equally smart people got it wrong? Was there something in common among these particular people that led them to get it right, or did they hazard a guess on approximately the same information that everyone else had and then end up in the winning group?
There's a fun article somewhere in my bookmarks that I can't find right now, but it covers the phenomenon of some bettor -- at the race track, or the stock market, or something -- who has this crazy winning streak and nobody can figure out why. Maybe it's this person's lucky hat, or maybe it's the notes they take, or maybe... who knows. But the most compelling reason is that they just happen to be the 1 member of a very large group who, through probability alone, keeps winning.
This other article sort of mentions it in passing:
> The prosecution also had an expert witness, an economist named David DeRosa. He didn’t share Heeb’s views about poker. DeRosa used a computer to simulate what might happen if 1,000 people each tossed a coin 10,000 times, assuming a certain outcome — such as tails — was equivalent to a win and the number of times a particular person won the toss was random. But the results were remarkably similar to those Heeb presented: A handful of people appeared to win consistently, and another group seemed to lose a large number of times. This wasn’t evidence that a coin toss involved skill, just that — much like the infinite number of monkeys typing — unlikely events can happen if we look at a large enough group.
(https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/are-the-best-g...)
Back to the posted article...
> parachutes, etc. etc.
I mean, all kidding aside, there are enough parachute failures at this point to have a pretty good idea of the grim odds of surviving a fall from an aircraft without one.
There are some really good reasons for conservativism in medicine. We have lost many, many lives to cures, treatments, and preventions that were "common sense" and only later discovered to be wrong. Or, sometimes, work, but only accidentally. Scurvy is the historical go-to example here. Its cause and treatment has been discovered, lost, and rediscovered many times, and each time, there was some common-sense treatment for it that was wrong.
> Gallant wouldn’t have waited for proof. He would have checked prediction markets and asked top experts for probabilistic judgments. If he heard numbers like 10 or 20 percent, he would have done a cost-benefit analysis and found that putting some tough measures into place, like quarantine and social distancing, would be worthwhile if they had a 10 or 20 percent chance of averting catastrophe.
Gallant will spend his life preparing for the next disaster that has a 20% chance of occurring and will eventually end up living in a small off-the-grid cabin deep in the woods, slowly being poisoned by the well water that isn't being tested correctly or often enough.
There is an opportunity cost for preparing for disaster. I'm all for being at least a little bit prepared. My favorite hobby involves going out and retrieving people who were unprepared. But I never criticize them for getting into bad situations, because it can happen to any of us. (With the possible exception of people who don't evacuate from hurricane areas. Those people piss me off.)
You can't prepare for everything. Most of us have never lived through a situation like we're living through now. How believable would this all have been a year ago? Who could believe that we'd be willing to stop the world economy because of a virus?
The irritating nut of this is that this isn't necessarily something you can learn from. Okay, let's say you're one of the people that did the mental math and chose not to react -- a "Goofus", according to this article. So you learn from it, yeah? Next thing comes along with a 10% or 20% chance, you prepare for it. You're in California, so, earthquake: you fill up your garage with supplies. The earthquake never comes. Then there's a 10% or 20% chance of wildfire destroying your community... so you move, except the wildfire never hits that community. Armed robbery. Disease. Storms. All of these have some kind of low probability of happening, but will have super serious consequences if they do, so you -- remembering covid-19 -- prepare for each of them. Decades come and go, and eventually, you decide, hey, you're busy. You can't really deal with that thing right now. And besides, none of the others have happened. Except, this time the floods do come, and you're screwed again, and now some guy is writing about how all those people who didn't properly prepare for the flood had bad mental models for assessing risk.
> A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on face masks. It reviewed the evidence and found that they probably helped prevent the spread of disease. Then it asked: how did the WHO, CDC, etc get this so wrong?
Absent from the blog post he references is that there's uncertainty over whether face masks might actually increase the risk of infection among healthy populations of non-medical professionals. The thinking goes that some number of people don't know how to properly use the masks (which he covers) and that they end up touching their face more as a result, and that the masks that most people are using aren't great filters for this particular virus, so the net change in probability of getting infected is going up.
But this isn't a certainty. There isn't enough data to know for sure if this is true or not. Even after this pandemic runs its course, there will probably still be disagreement in the studies to come because of all the confounding factors at play.
It's a reasonable position though, and that's why people keep getting conflicting information on this. You can get some treatment of the debate and confusion around this from this discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fcwcn7/to_mask_or_... ...people are posting studies supporting one position, then rebutting them, then offering professional advice in one direction, and then others in another. It's a mess, and while that thread isn't rigorously scientific, essentially the same argument is happening at and between the CDC and WHO and others.
> So you learn from it, yeah? Next thing comes along with a 10% or 20% chance, you prepare for it. You're in California, so, earthquake: you fill up your garage with supplies. The earthquake never comes. Then there's a 10% or 20% chance of wildfire destroying your community... so you move, except the wildfire never hits that community. Armed robbery. Disease. Storms. All of these have some kind of low probability of happening, but will have super serious consequences if they do, so you -- remembering covid-19 -- prepare for each of them.
In the last decade of living in Berkeley, me and my nearest ~150 friends+acquaintances have not experienced a wildfire destroying our community, an earthquake causing life-threatening damage, armed robbery (a few muggings, but less of us have been affected by 10-100x as are affected by covid), storms causing life-threatening damage, etc. So the probability of all of these cannot be 10% in a given couple-of-months period (as we did to Covid in Feb), because they would all have happened like a dozen times in the last decade if so.
10% is just really, really high, relative to the baseline for life-shattering catastrophes. I've seen journalists say "We can't talk about all the 10% catastrophes, we'd look alarmist!" The level of threat that Covid was in mid February was just not comparable to the tragedies you listed above, it was a straightforward exponential growth in a fairly severe disease happening in many countries. You can argue that at the time I (or professional epidemiologists or whoever) should've assigned it the sort of low probability (<1%) associated with things like armed robbery and wildfire hitting me in Downtown Berkeley, but I think you'd be wrong, there just weren't that level of strong arguments about the baseline safety. It was a real risk, and it was correct to prepare in late Feb (as I did, and self-quarantined as soon as the first Berkeley case was reported in early March).
I just wanted to rebut the thing that seemed most wrong to me. I hope you're well in this difficult time.
Alarmism is the bread and butter of journalism. Media consensus was that electing Trump was supposed have led to invading Poland and gassing minorities by now.